MILITARY: Operation Welcome Home: A Failure to Launch?

SAN DIEGO ---- With fanfare, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger launched
"Operation Welcome Home" here a month ago as California's $20
million answer to the question of how best to transition combat
veterans back to civilian life.

"Operation Welcome Home is groundbreaking," Schwarzenegger told
an audience assembled aboard the USS Midway Museum in San Diego
Harbor on a brilliant early June day. "Every year 30,000 veterans
come back to California. ... We want them to move smoothly from the
battlefront to the home front," he said. "We are doing more than
thanking them. We are showing them our gratitude through our
actions."

Now, funding squabbles have some veteran advocates wondering
whether Operation Welcome Home will ever get off the ground.

A bipartisan committee chaired by state Sen. Denise Moreno
Ducheny (D-San Diego) recently voted to cut the governor's
Operation Welcome Home funding increase from $8.4 million to $1.11
million.

The governor's office had called the funding critical in
allowing County Veteran Service Offices to meet the needs of the
state's 2.1 million veterans ---- including an estimated 165,000
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans ---- in filing for employment,
education, housing, health care, family support and federal
benefits.

While the $1.11 million funding compromise represents a 35
percent increase over last year's state funding for County Veterans
Service Offices, it still does not begin to offset increased demand
for services, said Pete Conaty, a lobbyist for the California
Association of County Veterans Service Officers.

"Without that money, Operation Welcome Home will almost
certainly be a failure," Conaty said. "And this would result in yet
another broken promise to our veterans. The governor realized that
for Operation Welcome Home to succeed, the key component was the
county veteran service officers."

J.P. Tremblay, deputy secretary for the California Department of
Veterans Affairs, agrees with at least part of that assessment.

"County veteran service officers are our boots on the ground,"
Tremblay said. "Their role in Operation Welcome Home is key, and
their funding is integral to the program's success. This is an
important issue to them, and it is an important issue for us.”

Ducheny said her committee did its best while "weighing all the
priorities."

"This 35 percent increase is more then they have ever gotten
before, both in real terms and as a percentage increase," she said
in a recent phone interview. "Everyone else in the budget is flat
or minus. We were just trying to find a balance. We are asking
senior citizens to live on less money, and the governor took $2
billion from schools.”

Ducheny and other legislators face a $19 billion deficit for the
2010-11 budget that is still weeks, if not months, from being
passed. Political insiders suggested Ducheny's committee might be
playing politics with one of the governor's pet projects in order
to get concessions elsewhere.

Ducheny denied that.

"Unless something changes, unless we find money somewhere, it is
where it is," the senator said of the $1.11 million appropriation
recommendation.